Calls to action come in many different forms. For some, it is a mystical/spiritual ‘call’ that gets them off their feet, I challenge people’s badness (which only seems to work on Republicans), and Ty over at KVOS tells it like it is. His latest posts is in response to complaints about the lack of local television, and includes full instructions on how to go about getting on NorthWest Notebook if you’re looking for exposure.
Now, I’m not going to do anything foolish like promise to stop whining about how I wished KVOS was all local news 24/7 because complaining is kind of ‘my thing.’ But Ty does a very good job with NorthWest Notebook and I think that we all owe it to him, as a community, to acknowledge that and call him every time something comes up.
It looks like the intro for an 80’s television series where a bunch of older men travel the county in a big bus solving crimes, which would be awesome. Most of them will find themselves with a lot of free time in a few months, and I think they should consider filming a pilot. Just imagine Matlock meets the A-Team, and it practically writes itself.
I’m a bit of a TV nut, in case you hadn’t noticed. While I don’t often associate the medium with the trancendant qualities of my fellow TV nuts, I think it leaves interesting clues about our culture.
The writers strike hasn’t been going for a week and I’m already starting to get antsy. The greatest casualty so far has of course been late night shows, made all the more tragic with Robert Reich getting bumped from the Daily Show.
It’s no secret that in the past few years, we’ve been living in an era with the best Television ever created. And while I think that era actually peaked in 2004-2005 (since then, we’ve lost The Sopranos, Deadwood, Veronica Mars, The West Wing) (and we are on track to lose The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs), the Writers Strike will hasten the demise. And not just because the networks will flood the airwaves with reality shows.
I have no idea how Rome got left off of that list of recently ended fantastic shows, but otherwise that sums up my concerns quite well. With some of my favorite shows already scheduled to end this season I’m concerned about next year. Many of the new shows this season are clunkers, but just this last summer there were a few really quite tremendous ones, specifically Burn Notice and Mad Men, suggesting that the well has not yet run dry for promising new ideas.
But with the possible loss of momentum and with so many shows finally coming in to their own, the future looks less bright. Many if not most of the best shows out there right now weren’t great at first but got better as the cast and crew got things figured out.
The writers have posted a series of short videos explaining their position and getting the word out on YouTube. This is the best of them, I think:
I don’t think they’re asking for anything unreasonable here, if anything it seems like they should be pushing for more.
Especially considering that not very long ago there was an ad campaign about how piracy takes money right out of the pockets of everyone who worked on that product. The lesson here seems to be that it doesn’t matter if I pay to download from one of their irritating official sources or I download it from a P2P network, because the people who worked so hard to make it happen won’t get paid. This is just ridiculous.
I hope that this is all over soon, but in the meanwhile I’m going to be looking overseas for some new material. Someone was talking to me the other day about a CBC show called ‘Intelligence’ that is supposed to be quite good. I looked it up and one of the stars is Max Headroom, so I’ll probably love it.
The Cascadia Weekly’s web site has both segments from the final KVOS McShane/Pike debate embedded via WMP, but in my browser both videos start at the same time and don’t have controls visible so it’s… difficult. If you have similar troubles, you can download individual WMVs from KVOS.com (Pike V. McShane #1&2).
If that isn’t an option, for instance you are somehow reading these words without having an internet connection, you can watch the debate this weekend on NorthWest Notebook. In fact you should do that even if you download the clips, and if you’re a Nielsen Family you should watch it twice.
In response to Ty’s comment, yes I did watch the mayoral forum and I thought it was great. Both candidates sounded good and I thought that they did a very good job. It wasn’t easy to turn away from football for half an hour, but I’m glad I did.
Ty and Tim Johnson (from the Cascadia Weekly) deserve high praise for putting it all together, they were able to get a good pace going and keep it interesting and informative. My only complaint was that it felt too short, but there’ll be one more between the two before the election.
Kudos also go to KVOS in general, and a plea that they do thing like this more often. It’s not that I don’t love Magnum PI and the Rockford Files (actually, I love them both), but I wish that they did more local interest programming.
Next week will be city council wards 3 & 4, which is of limited appeal to me because I am in neither but I’ll certainly watch anyway.
The forum is up on YouTube and Ty has links. I’ll have some more up about the specific things the candidates said later, but for now watch it yourself!
This is a clip from the beginning of the new episode of The IT Crowd, a parody of those “You wouldn’t steal a…” anti-piracy ads:
The IT crowd is (if you couldn’t guess) from the UK, and an American version is coming to NBC starting in February.
On the same topic, the Zero Punctuation series over at Escapist Magazine is tremendous. It’s a weekly video game review that is both very fast and very funny. They use some sort of proprietary egg format from the future for transferring the video’s into flash files, so I can’t embed another video and they only load successfully every other time. But I promise that it’s worth the extra effort.
A new business is moving into the Barkley Crossroads shopping center (near the Lowe’s home improvement center). Reset Games, a new- and used-video game store, is expected to open in November.
I have never heard of Reset Games, which makes me think that they might be an indie retailer which is awesome. The bar is very, very high for independent shops in that industry, and I wish them all the best (unless it’s some chain that I’ve just never heard of. In that case: “Meh.”).
From an earlier episode, The World According to Fox News:
In addition to being a great comedy show, I’ve learned a lot about Australia’s political system from watching it. It’s a good thing I’ve got a pause button and Wikipedia, otherwise I wouldn’t know what the heck they were talking about most of the time.
The companies are expected to continue negotiations. But NBC Universal’s hardball tactics, reported Friday in The New York Times, illustrates unrest among content providers concerning Apple’s pricing policies.
iTunes offers songs for download at 99 cents and video for $1.99. Media companies want more say in pricing and, in NBC Universal’s case, is anxious to offer different packages by bundling programs together at different prices.
This is just the latest in a string of these incidents between content providers and Apple, and frankly I’m less and less sympathetic to the former. The last line of the article:
NBC Universal also wants iTunes to stiffen anti-piracy provisions so computer users would not have easy access to illegal downloads.
What the hell does that mean? What does iTunes have to do with having access to any other content? Read the rest of this entry »
“Countdown’s” network debut comes on the heels of the program’s stellar performance this year. According to Nielsen Media Research, the program attracted 721,000 viewers in July, up an incredible 88% over July 2006. “Countdown” continues to be the number two cable news program at 8 p.m. ET, beating CNN by a 20% margin for the year.
I’m very excited to see him moving to a bigger audience, hopefully this will lead into a regular spot on NBC.
